A review by ergative
The Waking of Angantyr by Marie Brennan

3.75

I always enjoy reading Marie Brennan's work. This one had a real suck-you-in quality that I appreciate, and I gobbled it up. The author's note in the back is not to be missed, by the way: in brief, the genesis of this tale is as a fix-it fanfic of a Norse Saga that had an extremely disappointing conclusion -- but you should read the full details for yourself. Still, the story relied on repeated invocations of my least favourite trope: a woman dressed as a man, who is revealed as a woman, and loses everything that she managed to build up while dressed as a man. I hate it so much, and it happens multiple times here. And somehow, because of the requirement to start over after trope-revelation, we have multiple sets of characters, which means I can never really build up much sense of relationship to any one set of them. This means that their tragic ends (usually at the hands of someone going berserk and slaughtering them all -- Norse saga, remember) doesn't hit as hard as it might.